Rapid Environment Bootstrapping with Homebrew

2017 // 06 // 24

I recently acquired a new machine; wishing to start fresh, I wanted to go with less of a shotgun approach and more of a surgical strike for installations. This got me looking into using Homebrew and Homebrew Cask.

Homebrew is a package manager for MacOS that’s very good at handling installation of things like PHP, Node, and utilities like wget. There exists an extension, Homebrew Cask which targets larger GUI applications, such as PHP Storm or Virtual Box.

These tools make it quick and simple to install applications via the command line. To make it even easier, I compiled a list of the applications I use during my core workday and created a bash script to handle the installation of everything from Homebrew and Cask to the individual apps. Get the script!

Running this script is as easy as:

chmod a+x essentials-installer.sh

./essentials-installer.sh

You will be prompted for passwords as the script goes on. Please look at the script and remove any items you do not wish. I have many apps that you may not want there!

As this script runs, it will check that any of these applications exist and skip them if so. No need to worry about duplication. On that note – I want to keep my system organized so if I have an application installed, I’d want to make sure it was installed via Homebrew or Cask, so I can get a nice list out of everything and have one place to update. Enter Homebrew Cask Replacer. This will run through and swap out existing apps with their Homebrew Cask equivalent, tidying up.